In her 1995 paper on the evolutionary origins of patriarchy, she points out that, despite all the male aggression we see in the primate world, females aren’t helpless victims. They rarely submit willingly to male control. They actually have their own clever ways of exerting power over males. “Although male primates typically are larger than females, this does not mean that they always win when they have conflicts of interest with females,” she writes. And there’s one particularly strong example of this. It’s the other primate with which we share as close a relationship as we do with
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